Monday, June 30, 2008

There in a frail unsteady recliner at the edge of a burbling yard party, in the smoky, beefy, livid and thickening air, above green grass and below the muffling lilac sky, was the kind of place he would have to hover in, at an ambiguous juncture in the setting up of a conversation or a flirtation. Before speaking he sipped his beer.

Saturday, June 28, 2008

The car sits on the lawn for months and months with the hood open and the windows rolled down, as the grass gets taller and taller and turns yellow again. That’s life in the fallow accident—hearing the straws struck away by air through these parts called The Unawares, seeing nice homes churn past on glimmer supports, sorry along the foxglove path, crunch the black gravel a mountain’s descent makes as the mind in the mouth gums bits of earth together, threads, leaves, hairs, clay, into lots more nice homes involved in a diffuse war as we nod off. A nice summer hailstorm outside the window. The next morning we finally surfaced from the History of Ideas, and swam to shore—“like an inappropriate monster?” (as Chris said in a different context). A grunt lepidopterist for the summer, I wait in the sun at Transit Island. Wearing a pumpkin pie sweater. I am the twilight glitch homecoming workers try to see through.

Thursday, June 26, 2008

Bill Berkson, Sudden Address: Selected Lectures 1981-2006. True to the title, these are not “essays” at all, just the poet-critic-“art historian without portfolio” being chatty and wise about Philip Guston, Frank O’Hara, Walt Whitman, Dante, and other dead friends. “Rhetoric is a bobbin-tension. Can’t we have a simple active thread?” Most of the talks seem to have been accompanied by slideshows, and one misses the illustrations here. Guston is a major presence in nearly every talk (in company with Piero della Francesca, Cézanne, Chardin), and I kept interrupting my reading to go find a photo of the picture it was telling me about.

Marcella Durand,Western Capital Rhapsodies. I lucked into this at the library, and wanted to read it twice, but now somebody has it on hold. Poems of incredible sharpness and intricacy of visual detail, rendered in a fluid, constantly surprising syntax. Way entertaining. The book balances on two 25-part sequences, “City of Ports” and “Machine into Water.” The former is my favorite, perhaps because it distills so many themes that I’ve been interested in in my own recent poetry (traffic, construction materials, architecture, geology, landscape) with a precision and freshness that humble and challenge me, and a formal grace I don’t even approach. Here’s a sample, “City of Ports 14”:

An annoying noise, a buzzpenetrates miles of quarry rock

and weakens basalt structures:the flying buttresses think of

falling, taking their grainy wingsand centering angles back

to the ocean floor they firstspilled out of, that and the

meteorites flashing inward,drawn mothlike to the trembling

blue green glow of a livingatmosphere. In impact the tiny

heavy spheres, drilled by anotherthousand smaller bits, spark

off a swell, a wave, an undulationin the crust of beaten gold, and

speak messages deeper to the innerplanet circling on its own,

wrapped in a field ofdirection.

Benjamin Friedlander, A Knot Is Not a Tangle. A quick flutter of diaphanous lyrics wrapped in several layers of self-mocking apparatus. There’s a note on the manuscript, which was edited by Kimberley Filbee, then a note from the U.S. Postal Service in Buffalo (“The enclosed article was damaged in handling” etc.), then a prefatory invocation beginning “Dear Poet,” then the poems proper (“Vomit Scape,” “This Is Just to Say,” “Until It Sounds Just Like Philosophy” and “A Child’s Garden of Verses” among them), then the Editor’s Envoi in three parts: A, “Partial Objects” (poems with missing words indicated by empty brackets, á la Davenport’s translation of Sappho’s fragments); B, “Unused Titles” (“From the Mixed-up Files . . .” “Easier Said Than Done,” “In Basil Rathbone’sVoice,” “Rankle” and dozens more); and C, “Facsimile Chapbook Attributed to Bernie Fox,” supposed to be from the sixties by a dead and forgotten poet, with an editor’s afterword that pushes all the Borgesian buttons. The tone of the whole book is bitter, ironic, terse, offhand, funny-but-don’t-laugh, dead-on in its run through all the tones of our depressing cultural moment.

George Oppen, Selected Poems (edited by Robert Creeley). I saw Glen Mott read in New York last month, and he prefaced his own poems with three sections (10, 18 and 19) from Of Being Numerous, saying “I think this is absolutely contemporary” and of course it is. I wasn’t prepared for the speed and fluidity and almost hallucinatory quality of late poems like “From a Phrase of Simone Weil’s and Some Words of Hegel’s”—so different from the monolithic, jerky prosody of Discrete Series (which incidentally is underrepresented in this selection—only two short poems!).

John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance. I’m just getting started with this one, my doorstopper for the summer. Pure fun from the first impossible sentence. Of course Powys was a mystic and a crank (Colin tells me he claimed to be a reincarnated brontosaurus to boot!), but he was also a great realist, if that word has any meaning—an imaginer of nature and of human being in all its diversity and complexity, with all the senses, silly, daily, trivial, mythic, what’s there to be communicated.

Monday, June 23, 2008

I’m working on putting together a chapbook of a poem of mine called “Unless As Stone Is,” which I wrote two summers ago and have been revising ever since. (It should be ready and reified in time for my reading on July 13th.) It’s based on Dante’s famous sestina from the “rime petrose” (stone rhymes, or poems for the stony lady). This blog post is brings together 3 English translations of the sestina , as well as the Italian original and a silly homeophonic version which was one of the early drafts of my poem.

SestinaProse version by George Kay[This version, from The Penguin Book of Italian Verse, is the source of the title and several phrases in my poem.]

I have come to a short day and a great arc of shadow, alas! and to the hill’s whitening when color vanishes from the grass; and my desire does not, for this, change its green, it is so rooted in the hard stone that speaks and hears as if it were a woman.

Likewise this heaven-born woman remains frozen like snow in the shade; for she is not moved, unless as stone is, by the sweet time which warms the hills and makes them turn from white to green so that it may cover them with flowers and plants.

When she has a grass garland upon her head, she draws our mind from every other woman, because she mingles the waving yellow and green in such lovely wise that Love comes to stand in their shadow, he who has locked me between small hills much more firmly than lime locks stone.

Her beauty has more virtue than precious stones, and the wound she gives is not cured by herb; for I have fled by plain and hill to be able to escape such a woman, and neither mound nor wall nor green foliage can ever give me shade from her light.

I have seen her dressed in green, so fashioned that she would have inspired a stone with the love I bear her very shadow; so that I have wished her on a fair meadow of grass, surrounded by highest hills, as much in love as ever woman was.

But well may the rivers return to the hills before this soft green wood catches fire, as fair woman is wont to, for my sake; so that I would choose to sleep out my life on hard stone and go about feeding on grass, only to look where her garments cast shade.

Every time the hills cast blackest shade, it makes this young woman disappear amid fair green, as a man hides a precious stone in grass.

Sestinatrans. James Schuyler[I think this is a lovely translation. I didn’t look at it when I was writing my poem, but I think it was the first version I ever read this poem in, in one of Kenneth Koch’s anthologies.]

I have reached, alas, the long shadowand short day of whitening hillswhen color is lost in the grass.My longing, all the same, keeps greenit is so hooked in the hard stonethat speaks and hears like a woman.

In that same way this new womanstands as cold as snow in shadow,less touched than if she had been stoneby the sweet time that warms the hillsand brings them back from white to green,dressing them in flowers and grass.

Who, when she wreathes her hair with grass,thinks of any other woman?The golden waves so mix with greenthat Love himself seeks its shadowthat has me fixed between small hillsmore strongly than cemented stone.

More potent than a precious stone,her beauty wounds, and healing grasscannot help; across plains and hillsI fled this radiant woman.From her light I found no shadowof mountain, wall, or living green.

I have seen her pass, dressed in green,and thought the sight would make a stonelove, as I, even her shadow.And I have walked with her on grass,speaking like a lovesick woman,enclosed within the highest hills.

But streams will flow back to their hillsbefore this branch, sappy and green,catches fire (as does a woman)from me, who would bed down on stoneand gladly for his food crop grassjust to see her gown cast shadow.

The heavy shadow cast by hillsthis woman's light can change to green,as one might hide a stone in grass.

Sestina of the Lady Pietra degli Scrovignitrans. Dante Gabriel Rossetti[The standard Victorian version, which I failed consult earlier, and now I wish I had. (Natheless?)]

To the dim light and the large circle of shadeI have clomb, and to the whitening of the hills,There where we see no color in the grass.Natheless my longing loses not its green,It has so taken root in the hard stoneWhich talks and hears as though it were a lady.

Utterly frozen is this youthful lady,Even as the snow that lies within the shade;For she is no more moved than is the stoneBy the sweet season which makes warm the hillsAnd alters them afresh from white to greenCovering their sides again with flowers and grass.

When on her hair she sets a crown of grassThe thought has no more room for other lady,Because she weaves the yellow with the greenSo well that Love sits down there in the shade,–Love who has shut me in among low hillsFaster than between walls of granite-stone.

She is more bright than is a precious stone;The wound she gives may not be healed with grass:I therefore have fled far o’er plains and hillsFor refuge from so dangerous a lady;But from her sunshine nothing can give shade,–Not any hill, nor wall, nor summer-green.

A while ago, I saw her dressed in green,–So fair, she might have wakened in a stoneThis love which I do feel even for her shade;And therefore, as one woos a graceful lady,I wooed her in a field that was all grassGirdled about with very lofty hills.

Yet shall the streams turn back and climb the hillsBefore Love’s flame in this damp wood and greenBurn, as it burns within a youthful lady,For my sake, who would sleep away in stoneMy life, or feed like beasts upon the grass,Only to see her garments cast a shade.

How dark soe’er the hills throw out their shade,Under her summer green the beautiful ladyCovers it, like a stone cover’d in grass.

Saturday, June 21, 2008

He did not even shave daily, but it was a downy young beard he had and a shining, sharkish, rubbery and resilient respectability that could have cartilage, no bones, and swim frictionless amid whatever. (Crum speculates that to the acute hearing of a dolphin, a snowfall on the surface of the water might sound like “a huge damn thunderstorm.”) The brittle opening chords, the one rude elbow of an unforeseen entirety, the law of these woods. I am a pirate, I have a hook, the gravel is shark-infested waters. Glowing and remote, a moat of darkened heads between. As paragraphs I try to light saying contrail stirring air ribbons for the noon passage now, at solstice, out of summer’s rise. Could inch along like talking to himself in American, out here and talking himself west with another “and then,” another great problem with the wind coming up screwing with him and the plan, him and me, him and the shore, old gray cedar shakes here and there in the sand.

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Nothing was negligible to this despiser of the sun once he was out-of-doors. There was no weed that lacked interest for him. But it was not a merely scientific interest, still less was it an aesthetic one. The master-current of the man's passionate West-country nature found in a thousand queer, little, unattractive objects, such as mouldering sticks, casual heaps of stones, discolored funguses on tree roots, dried-up cattle droppings, old posts with rusty nailheads, tree stumps with hollow places full of muddy rainwater, an expression of itself that wide-stretching horizons failed to afford.

And George Oppen, "World, World—":

Failure, worse failure, nothing seenFrom prominence,Too much seen in the ditch.

Sunday, June 15, 2008

In abstract terms, what we have here is the irritated point as latent energy. At the slightest impetus, the point is about to emerge from a state in which its mobility was concealed, to move onwards, to take on one or more directions. It is about to become linear. In concrete pictorial terms: the seed strikes root, initially the line is directed earthwards, though not to dwell there, only to draw energy thence for reaching up into the air. The next effect of contact with the soil is that the seed rises, and this effect is often followed by a split (dicotyledons). This division becomes the beginning of further upward motion. The spirit of this form-creation is linear.

And George Oppen (from "Return"):

And we saw the seed,The minuscule Sequoia seedIn the museum by the tremendous slabOf the tree. And imagined the seedIn soil and the growth quickenedSo that we saw the seed reach out, forcingEarth thru itself into bark, wood, the greenNeedles of a redwood until the treeStood in the room without soil—How much of the earth'sCrust has livedThe seed's violence!The shock is metaphysical.

Saturday, June 14, 2008

I think a thrips just walked across this page. A bicycle with no seat leaning on the wet chainlink fence, dripping, or a proposal that flowers from the root-tips upward and out, white nervous lace, but I don’t solve those kind of problems. In my dream, my job counting camas fruits and withered flowers combined with Agamben’s account of Cavalcanti’s erotic pneumophantasmology, so that we were looking for seed-heads that contained a love potion or something, but discovered that some plots had been sprayed by an evil scientist to prevent the fruits from growing. A weird cold rainy day. Redwood I never noticed in the corner of the yard. Another gloomy pale day. Dare matter on.

Saturday, June 7, 2008

This is abstract because a line break’s a split end where lunge discovers its lurch already furnished. It has a jokey-psychedelic cover to which was affixed a pebble painted blue (it was light—maybe pumice or just foam plastic) which fell off when I touched it. It was upon this rosy toy that the word “oolite” now fixed itself, like a label on the surface of a red moon, and although the Jobber’s stony island was hidden from their eyes at that spot, the tutor had the sensation that the whole of Portland, with all its people and all their passions, was no more solid than this airy, floating, ephemeral balloon. And today Dirk and I learned from Wikipedia that “There is no such thing as ‘Chocula lore.’” All we have to rest on are jeans-ad certainties. And lots of thimbleberry in bloom. For she did bloom, if blandly, under their bland parentage, like some great soft whitish flower topping a low strict herm of a cactus along some desert freeway.

Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Giorgio Agamben,Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience, and Laura Moriarty,UltravioletaI took these two very different books with me on a trip to New York a couple weeks ago and read them alternately. They are both, among other things, fussy investigations of the pronoun I. Agamben interrogates it discursively, with reference to the history of philosophy, and Moriarty allegorically, with reference to the history of poetry, using standard science-fiction tropes as a scaffolding. (In her novel, "the I" are a semi-disembodied alien race that feed on human and Martian emotions—perhaps by entering their poems—and that have colonized the solar system—"it was like an invasion of therapists.") Both make reference to Descartes's "I think therefore I am" and Rimbaud's "I is another," and both seem to conclude that "I" is a creature of, a creation of, a convenience of, language: the thing that speaks, the thing limited by language. Which throws a new light on Wittgenstein's dubious "The limits of my language are the limits of my world." I never cared much for poets' and philosophers' pronoun anxiety, but now it's starting to get interesting.

Clark Coolidge, At EgyptA long strange trip through a solider cosmos than Moriarty's. One theme is the infinite gradations of blue sky:

But the blue now, the blues through the roof they intendedis a coal blue, as if radiation rates a mineral explanationthat hue of blue darkening past sunset seen throughsandstone gaps, in temple, past navy blue dye of a fountain pena metallic crystal I lost like its sickle to the earthshineslice of the moon, near Islamic sun, and its one pilot starits second one in reddish conjuction, such stellar cyclesI time through masterful space, sandstone lapsmetered to meet on this silver against feather nightbrought to plumb downtown under weight of no words

George Kubler,The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of ThingsA meticulous little treatise on the methods by which we learn from and categorize human-made objects. Full of brilliantly offhand examples drawn from the whole history of art, craft and architecture (Kubler also wrote a book on 16th-century Mexican architecture), all illustrating rather sketchy schemes of categorization. There's also a beautiful index: Talent, Taste, Taxco, Tedium, Temperament, Teotihuacán, Text editing, Time, Toledo, Toltec-Maya, Tomb-furnishings, Topology, Trait, Tree-rings, Triviality, Twain, Mark, Typology.

Peaches and Bats #10is a hand-sewn zine with a letterpress cover, 64-pg. laserprintered interior and foldout color poster insert. It costs $5. You can order it by Paypal here or arrange to trade for your chapbook or magazine by sending an email to peachesandbats AT gmail DOT com.

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